TIME magazine, Monday, Jul. 02, 1984
By John Skow
For a survivor of housework and motherhood, laughter is still the best revenge
Notice: Car-pool moms entered in the U-Haul Mother-of-the-Year brake-off should complete the following literary quiz. Answers must be written in eyebrow pencil, and nuttiness counts,
1) For ten points, and a year’s supply of mental floss, what American philosopher, whose latest book has been ensconced on the New York Times best seller list for 40 weeks, described the stance of a pregnant woman as “like a kangaroo wearing Earth Shoes”?
2) Who first defined the contribution of American mothers to the psychological well-being of their children as “guilt: the gift that keeps on giving”?
3) From whom did Tocqueville, while touring American suburbs, steal his famous one-liner that “the grass is always greener over the septic tank”? Hint: Henry David Thoreau is a good guess, but wrong.
4) What noted existentialist and television celebrity, when asked in supermarket parking lots whether she is the legendary Erma Bombeck, blushes prettily, lowers her gaze and says, “No, I’m Ann-Margret, but thank you anyway “?
“I’ll be honest,” says Bombeck (for it is indeed she, the syndicated star humorist of 900 papers in the U.S. and Canada, and the baggy-toreador-pants clown of ABC’S Good Morning America), “when I started, I thought I was squirrelly. I thought it was just me. After the first columns, everyone on the block confessed it was them too.” Those early columns, written in Centerville, Ohio, back in the early ’60s, were not quite Corinthian, but they sure were Ermaic. Their message was that housework, if it is done right, can kill you. It was that the women who kept house in the happy hunting ground called suburbia were so lonely that they held meaningful conversations with their tropical fish. It was that “you become about as exciting as your food blender. The kids come in, look you in the eye, and ask you if anybody’s home.”
The message has not changed in substance, although many of the women she wrote about 20 years ago have gone on to divorces, master’s degrees and careers, and Bombeck and her husband are now the wealthy proprietors not of an $18,000 tract house near Dayton but of a lavish hacienda on a hilltop near Phoenix. “Women around the world are coming to the point where they are looking at their domestic situations and saying, ‘My God, I’m going crazy, it’s climbing-the-wall time,’ ” says Bombeck. She is 57 now (”somewhere between estrogen and death,” she mutters); her three children are grown and flown, and the elegant white walls of her fine house do not have crayon marks or grape jelly on them. But motherhood is a sentence without parole—have some guilt with your chicken soup; eat, eat!—and Bombeck and her fans have no trouble understanding each other. “I could move up to Alaska,” she says, “where the nearest neighbor is 300 miles away, get there by dog sled, walk into the cabin, pour a cup of coffee and then hear her say, ‘These kids are driving me crazy.’ ”
Dropping in is what Bombeck does. Three times a week in the newspapers, and twice more on television, she plays the nation’s dingbatty neighbor, who comes in the back door without knocking and cheers everyone up by saying, “Never mind the mess here, honey, let me tell you about world-class squalidness.” And then yarns away, maybe, about babies so wet that their diapers give off rainbows (a Phyllis Diller line she loves to steal). Or about her husband, the football watcher, who sits in front of the tube “like a dead sponge surrounded by bottle caps” until “the sound of his deep, labored breathing puts the cork on another confetti-filled evening.” About her schoolboy son who flunked lunch. About her washing machine, which eats one sock in every pair; her kids ask where the lost ones go, and she tells them that they go to live with Jesus. About how, when one kid ate an unknown quantity of fruit on a supermarket expedition, she offered to weigh him and pay for everything over 53 Ibs. About why it is all right to store useless leftovers in the refrigerator: “Garbage, if it’s made right, takes a full week.” About how young mothers want desperately to talk to someone who isn’t teething, and the woeful results when they try to generate conversation with those lumps, their husbands, by asking, ” ‘What kind of a day did you have dear?’ One husband reportedly answered by kicking the dog, another went pale and couldn’t find words, another bit his necktie in half . . .”
This is classic Bombeck, the wild exaggeration compressed into the stinging one-liner that only slightly overstates the awfulness of the truth. You don’t think husbands and kids are that bad? Listen, let me tell you about bad. “After 30 years of marriage, I felt like a truss in a drugstore window.” You think that’s-overstated? Let me tell you what it’s like to be a working mother, “racing around the kitchen in a pair of bedroom slippers, trying to quick-thaw a chop under each armpit . . .” Shared responsibilities? “Transporting children is my husband’s 26th favorite thing; it comes somewhere between eating lunch in a tearoom and dropping a bowling ball on his foot.” Listen, let me tell you. . .
Trench warfare of this kind is waged not against men and kids, but against loneliness and self-pity. The quick, hit-’em-again-with-another-joke style fits the desperate nature of the combat. The young mother who reads it may have a degree in psychology from Michigan State, but as she cleans up after the puppy while trying to separate two children who are fighting over a linty piece of bubble gum, she may not be in the mood for compound-complex sentences. She may smile over a column by Art Buchwald, the master of the discovered absurdity, or one of Russell Baker’s elegantly sane demonstrations that the world is crazy. But if she enlists in an army, it is likely to be Bombeck’s. Am I really down on the kitchen floor with an old pair of Jockey shorts doing this? Yes, and there’s Bombeck with pork chops under her arms. Such realizations (epiphanies, a James Joyce scholar would call them) explain Bombeck’s syndication in those 900 papers, the wild success of her seven books, and reader loyalty that does not stop short of fanaticism. No doubt they also explain her eight-year run on Good Morning America, where her appearances are consistently cheerful but not so sharp or funny as her columns. Bombeck’s fans want Bombeck, and they are prepared to excuse home movies.
Her self-caricature, the rhinoceroid slob in housecoat and curlers who hasn’t seen her feet since grade school, is not even a fun-house mirror image of reality. She is a good-looking, brown-haired woman (though the hair color varies according to whim) who is, if not gaunt, at any rate acceptably trim at 5 ft. 2 in. and 127 Ibs. Is it a surprise that her daughter Betsy, 30, and her sons Andrew, 28, and Matthew, 25, have lost their baby teeth? And that her husband is not a football-stupefied turnip but rather an articulate, quick-minded fellow? Bill Bombeck retired in 1978 after a successful career as a school administrator, and now manages their income of $500,000 to $1 million a year. He is more likely to be found jogging than watching the tube, and four years ago he ran the Boston Marathon in the creditable time of 3 hr. 29 min. Not all of the one-line zappers come from her side of the table; Bill will breeze into the house and announce with a big smile that he has just been to the library and that all of her books were in. She replies that he looked like a dead fish after his last road race and that he had better slow down. “You don’t understand,” she says. “I’m too old to shop around. You’re it.” The strong affection between the two is evident.
There is a hint of where the columns come from when Bombeck is persuaded to talk about herself. “My life story?” she says. “Fifteen minutes top. You’re looking at shallow. I’m just not that deep. You’re looking at a bundle of insecurity. I always think that everything good is going to evaporate and disappear overnight. I am the quietest person at the party. I position myself at the chip dip and don’t leave all night. I still have a very ordinary, simple person trapped in this rich, gorgeous, successful body.” The joke is practiced and sure, but she does not want her listener to miss her point, so she spells it out. “The whole thrust of my existence is that I’m ordinary.” It seems important to her to believe this. Another joking statement of the theme: “Everyone thinks of ordinary as some kind of skin disease.” Then she quotes the sort of thing she says when she gives a commencement speech: “Most of you are going to be ordinary. You are not going to the moon. You’ll be lucky to find the keys to your car in the back parking lot. But some of you are going to be great things to yourselves. You are going to be the best friend someone ever had . . .”
The journey that did not lead Bombeck to the moon began in Dayton, and the date could be set accurately enough as June 4, 1936. She was nine, and that was the day her father, a crane operator named Cassius Fiste, died of a heart attack at 42. “One day you were a family,” she recalls, “living in a little house at the bottom of a hill. The next day it was all gone.” The furniture, including Erma’s bed and dresser, was immediately repossessed, and her half sister went off to live with her natural mother. Erma and her mother, 25-year-old Erma Fiste, shared a bedroom in her grandmother’s house, and each day Mother Erma would get up at 5 a.m., fix breakfast for her daughter, see that she was dressed for school, and then leave in time to work the 7 a.m. shift at the Leland Electric factory. An adult observer would have seen a spunky young widow doing her best in bad times, but not until years later did Erma think of her mother’s tough-minded energy as wise or heroic. What she felt at the time was a daily desertion. When her mother married a moving-van operator, Albert (”Tom”) Harris, two years later, Erma gave him the classic drop-dead greeting: “If you think you’re going to take my father’s place, you’re crazy.” His attitude, she says, was “This kid needs sitting on.” Eventually Erma and Tom made their adjustment. The incredible self-centeredness of children, normal and natural but often savagely cruel, has been a consistent theme in her humor.
When her daughter showed signs of shyness and loneliness, Mother Erma signed her up for tap-dancing lessons as therapy, then took her to an audition for a Kiddie Revue at a local radio station. Erma stayed on the program for nearly eight years, tap dancing and singing. “She was quite a little hoofer,” says her mother, who still has Erma’s signed song sheets for On the Good Ship Lollipop and I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter. Bombeck says it is obvious that the wrong Erma broke into show biz. When her mother, now a lively 73, began to appear with her on talk shows, Bombeck would tell the producers, “Don’t worry about Mamma not talking. Worry about her taking over the show.”
Which is exactly what she does. Mother Erma, who lives with her husband in nearby Sun City, admits that she “never had a sense of humor growing up. But as I get older, I get crazier. Me and Erma are both sort of silly together. The humor helped us to get closer. We began to see life as it is and not take it so seriously.”
At Emerson Junior High in Dayton, Bombeck started writing a humor column for a school newspaper called The Owl. Says Bill Bombeck: “The format hasn’t changed a lot. You’re talking about someone who has been writing a personal column since she was twelve or 13 years old.” Bombeck had been fairly offhanded about singing and dancing, but wising off in print was the best thing since soaping windows at Halloween. A couple of years later she was at it again, clowning about shoplifting, clearance sales and the lunch menu for the newsletter of Rike’s department store, where she worked to pay college expenses. “You can’t imagine how it fractured those people,” she says now. “I knew exactly what I wanted to do. God, I wanted to write. That’s all I wanted to do. I really loved the exaggeration. I still write about passing my varicose veins off as textured stockings.”
Her pursuit of a college education took her through uncertain territory. Middle-class teenagers of the time went on to college from high school the way they went to the drive-in for frozen custard and French fries. Everyone enrolled somewhere, and no one thought much about it. But Bombeck was working class, the first person in her family’s history even to graduate from high school. College was not seen as a necessity for many young women, or even as especially desirable. “Your goals were supposed to be modest,” she recalls. “If you were a girl, you either got a job and paid board, or you got married.” She took typing and shorthand at a vocational school and worked as a copygirl at the Dayton Herald to meet expenses. (Bill Bombeck worked at the morning Journal as a copy boy.) Erma saved enough money to begin courses at Ohio University, in Athens, but after a semester she was broke again. She returned to Dayton, got the department-store job and enrolled at the University of Dayton, the Roman Catholic school where Bill was a student.
Living at home and paying her own way, Bombeck made it through college in four years, including three sessions of summer school. The experience was not rich in what is usually thought of as college life, but she got the degree, and she did it on her own. In a second profound act of independence, she converted at 22 from the United Brethren Church to Roman Catholicism. “I saw something in it I wanted to have,” she says. “There is something very soothing about the whole thing. A love of God is easier for me to accept than the fear.” She remains a believer, who says, quirkily, “I never laugh when I pray. That’s God’s turn.” Like many Catholics, however, she is troubled by doctrinal issues affecting birth and reproduction. She agrees with the church prohibition of abortion but cannot accept strictures against birth control. “The group I ran with would have six, seven, eight kids and be drowning underneath. Let’s face it, the earth cannot afford this Catholicism.”
The Dayton Herald took on a gifted but erratic recruit after Bombeck graduated from the university. As a reporter, she recalls, “I was terrible at straight items. When I wrote obituaries, my mother said the only thing I ever got them to do was die in alphabetical order.” Even with her shorthand, she says, “I could never get the knack of listening and taking notes at the same time.” She would get excited and forget to write things down, and “everyone I interviewed ended up sounding like me. I did that with Mrs. Roosevelt and Mrs. Eisenhower.” The idea of Eleanor Roosevelt sounding like Erma Bombeck clearly had its bizarre appeal, but before anything truly lunatic could come of it, Erma quit the paper for good in 1953. She and Bill, by then a struggling high school social studies and American history teacher, had been married four years, and, she says, “I was sick of working. Putting on pantyhose every morning is not just whoopee time. My dream was to putter around the house, learn how to snap beans, put up curtains and bake bread.” The young couple adopted Betsy, and Erma, who had learned domesticity as a child, returned to the home, an event that was to prove only slightly less momentous than Douglas MacArthur’s return to the Philippines.
As everyone who has made the mad leap into parenthood knows, it is not the first child but the second whose arrival skews life into a grotesque caricature of its former civility. When Bombeck was several months pregnant with Andrew, the family moved to a tract development a few miles from Dayton that she was to satirize as “Suburbian Gems.” Its real name is Centerville. The Bombecks lived on Cushwa Drive (”probably named for some dentist”) in a house like all the others except for one prized interior feature, a $1,500 “two-way” fireplace, and on the outside, a front door they painted red so that Mother Erma and Tom Harris could find them when they visited.
None of the residents of Centerville, least of all the Bombecks, thought they were doing anything hilarious as they mowed their lawns and carted their kids to Cub Scout meetings. Bill tinkered around the house, and pieced out his teacher’s salary by painting houses and working at the post office on school vacations. Erma, he says, was always repainting or redecorating, moving the furniture around. There was, of course, a septic tank, and in the summer, says Erma, “you could see that little sucker sink into the ground and you’d think, ‘There goes another $400.’ ” But there weren’t many one-liners: “Who was there to listen?”
By an odd chance, the family in the house across the street was that of a young radio broadcaster, Phil Donahue, with five growing children. Donahue, an old friend now, whose morning TV appearances bring housework to a halt across the country, confirms that Bombeck was by no means the neighborhood clown. She and Bill, he says, were among the most hardworking of the development’s house-proud do-it-yourselfers. All the houses had Early American furniture, including the inevitable rocker with a cushion tied to the back. The idea of Bombeck as a hopelessly disorganized housewife “is, at the very least, highly exaggerated. When you went to Erma’s place, you never had to step over dirty underwear. At least in the evenings.”
The pressure that was to fizz through the crazy columns was building, however. Listen to Bombeck, who wanted to give her kids the secure childhood she had missed: “I was overwhelmed. You get from your mother what things should be. I’m killing myself. We all did. Are you ready for this? I’m sitting there at midnight bending a coat hanger, putting nose tissue on it to make a Christmas wreath for the door. You know what it looks like? It looks like a coat hanger with tissue that is going to melt when it rains. It’s a desperation you cannot imagine. I had a husband who worked at his job until 7 and 8 p.m. taking care of other people’s children. That’s when I remember reading Jean Kerr, who would sit out in her car and hide, reading the car-manual section on tire pressure. It’s ridiculous. The whole thing is ridiculous.” Then a deep breath: “It’s the core of laughter. If you can’t make it better, you can laugh at it.”
